How to install a simple game on a Linux PC

tornado681 · 10-11-2007, 11:26 AM

Hello,

I have a linux PC running RedHat 5.0. I am a graduate student and my linux PC is part of a network. There is a system admin. person that does all of the updates etc. I would like to install a simple game (i.e. solitaire for linux machines) but am having trouble doing so. Could someone please try to walk me through the steps to install and get running a simple game such as solitaire. Thanks in advance,

--tornado

b0uncer · 10-11-2007, 11:36 AM

Well, what have you done so far? Did you already find the game you want to install, and download it if it was in the internet? What files do you have there (a compressed archive maybe, like .tar.gz or .tar.bz2)?

Surely we can help, if you can provide more information - more specific information

I wonder if they call the new RedHats (RHEL etc.) "RedHats", and if they do, why; RedHat 5 is very very old (RedHat series grew up to RH9 "Shrike", after which the name turned "Fedora Core" 1-6, and now Fedora 7 and so on -- nowadays people often refer to the non-free [not Fedora] operating systems from RedHat company as "RedHat Linux", even though I still consider it means the older RH series that were freely available for everyone -- RedHat Enterprise Linux and such are different from those).

tornado681 · 10-11-2007, 12:16 PM

I downloaded the suite of games from:

http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownl...load-3436.html

I unzipped the file and untarred it. I then read the INSTALL file. I typed 'configure'.

When I run configure, I get the following error:

Code:

  checking for PYGTK... configure: error: Some games need python, but python, pygtk or gnome-python-desktop packages were not found.

I am about 95% sure python is installed on the system. Do I need to specify the python path explicitly?

Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks,

tornado

jay73 · 10-11-2007, 12:56 PM

It's more likely that you need to install the devel packages for python, pygtk, etc.

rocket357 · 10-11-2007, 01:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tornado681

Code:

  checking for PYGTK... configure: error: Some games need python, but python, pygtk or gnome-python-desktop packages were not found.

The problem isn't whether or not you have Python installed, it's whether or not you have pygtk (python bindings for gtk) installed.

You can check your python install by opening a terminal and running "python". Once you get to a prompt that looks like this: ">>>", you can type "import pygtk" and hit enter. If nothing seems to happen (you go directly back to ">>>"), you likely have a PATH issue (configure can't find pygtk?), and if you get an error message (i.e. "ImportError: No module named pygtk"), you likely don't have pygtk installed. (Exit from the python interpreter with Ctrl-D).

Since RH5.0 is such an ancient system, I'd honestly recommend upgrading to a more recent distro (Fedora/*buntu/etc...). This will help in two ways: 1) with RH5.0 you might run into issues of lib versions being too old to run the software you want to run, so upgrading will solve that problem and 2) modern distro's handle dependencies MUCH better than the old RH rpm-hell.

Just my thoughts.

tornado681 · 10-11-2007, 01:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rocket357

You can check your python install by opening a terminal and running "python". Once you get to a prompt that looks like this: ">>>", you can type "import pygtk" and hit enter. If nothing seems to happen (you go directly back to ">>>"), you likely have a PATH issue (configure can't find pygtk?), and if you get an error message (i.e. "ImportError: No module named pygtk"), you likely don't have pygtk installed. (Exit from the python interpreter with Ctrl-D).

I ran python. I typed "import pygtk" and nothing happened (went back to the the >>>). So how do I set the path?

Do I use a setenv command? Please advise. Thanks,

tornado

tornado681 · 10-11-2007, 01:24 PM

I should also mention that when I do a 'uname -a', I get:

Quote:

Linux freja 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 #1 SMP Tue Sep 25 11:45:55 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So is it redhat v8 instead of 5 (as i originally thought?)

farslayer · 10-11-2007, 03:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tornado681

I should also mention that when I do a 'uname -a', I get:

Code:

Linux freja 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 #1 SMP Tue Sep 25 11:45:55 EDT 2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

So is it redhat v8 instead of 5 (as i originally thought?)

I think your first assessment of RHEL 5 is correct.
cat /etc/issue
or
cat /etc/redhat-release
should clear things up as to which version you are running.

yum install gnome-games should grab the package from the repository and install it, and it's dependencies automatically with no need to compile it. You shouldn't need the package you downloaded.

rocket357 · 10-12-2007, 03:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tornado681

I ran python. I typed "import pygtk" and nothing happened (went back to the the >>>). So how do I set the path?

Do I use a setenv command? Please advise. Thanks,

tornado

Each distro has it's own "quirks" and subtleties that make software installation via source code fun. As posted by farslayer, using the distro's built-in package manager is vastly easier than installing from source, so I'd have to second that recommendation. Also, given that you're running a 2.6.18 kernel I'd have to agree with farslayer again that you're correct in saying RHEL 5.0 (NOT RH 5.0 as I assumed). Most of the time you'll see the older free RedHat listed as "RH", and the newer non-free RedHat listed as "RHEL" (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Apologies for calling your system ancient, as it's far from that =)

I tend to stick to portage/ports (Gentoo Linux and FreeBSD/OpenBSD, respectively) for handling my packages, so honestly I can't say how to resolve the PATH issue with ./configure not finding pygtk, though I'd have to say it's likely you could set a configure option to force configure to look in a specific location (something along the lines of --prefix=/path/to/installation (but not --prefix, as that points to the parent of the installation directory for the current package, AFAIK)). For future reference, you can probably run ./configure --help or the like to find options that you can pass to configure.

Good luck getting the software working...oh, and would it happen to be the PySol suite? Just curious.

tornado681 · 10-15-2007, 12:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by farslayer

yum install gnome-games should grab the package from the repository and install it, and it's dependencies automatically with no need to compile it. You shouldn't need the package you downloaded.

When I do a yum install gnome-games, I get:

Code:

freja:gall[93]% yum install gnome-games
Loading "rhnplugin" plugin
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
This system is not registered with RHN.
RHN support will be disabled.
You need to be root to perform this command.

Any other options besides asking root to install it for me? Id rather not since his job really isnt to install games on our machines for personal use...

All the help so far has been much appreciated. Thanks,

--tornado

farslayer · 10-15-2007, 02:21 PM

Installing games on a WORK machine !! tsk tsk

No I don't know any another way other than using root, or manually installing it to the users home directory as I now think was your original intention.

jay73 · 10-15-2007, 02:51 PM

tornado,

Have you considered a livecd? Many of those come with a basic set of games. It's not the fastest way of running Linux but at least it will work and if playing a game is all you need it to, it shouldn't be all that bad. Of course, if the admin has locked the BIOS, that's off the table as well.

tornado681 · 10-17-2007, 01:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by farslayer

Installing games on a WORK machine !! tsk tsk

No I don't know any another way other than using root, or manually installing it to the users home directory as I now think was your original intention.

I emailed root and asked him to do a 'yum install gnome-games' for me. He told me

Quote:

There aren't any in the RH5 channel for freja

freja is my local machine. What should I tell him to do in order to get gnome-games installed?

Again, thanks for everyone's help.

--tornado

tornado681 · 10-18-2007, 12:12 PM

anyone?......

jay73 · 10-18-2007, 02:39 PM

Well, I'm not very familiar with RH but I seem to remember that it splits up software packages into channels. In order to install software that is not available from one's current channels, one would have to add the relevant one(s). If your admin knows his/her job, (s)he either has determined that there isn't any such channel available (RH5 is quite old) or maybe there is but (s)he is simply implying that you shouldn't bother asking again. I'll leave that for you to figure out.